Catalog Assessment Process

To gather information about the College Catalog, we conduct annual surveys.

We have records on the people who get a copy of the printed catalog. We provide to them a survey about the printed catalog.

We have tried the online surveys in the past, for users of the online catalog, but didn't acquire any significat amounts of data.

Printed Catalog Survey Questions

We are asking about the following items:

1. What best describes your role at City College of San Francisco?

2. How long have you been using the printed College Catalog?

3. How often do you refer to the printed Catalog?

4. For each of the major sections of the Catalog,

How often to you refer to the printed Catalog for (fill in section here)?

How easy is it to find what you’re looking for?

How accurate is the information you find?

5. How does your usage of the printed College Catalog compare with your usage of the online College Catalog?

6. Did you know that these Catalog Addenda were published online? (Yes/No)

7. How often do you refer to these addenda?

8. Do you have any final comments?

How Results of Printed Catalog Survey are Used

We compare the different sections to get comparison data on usage, clarity, and accuracy of the various sections. We will use this information to help focus future editing efforts.

Looking at question #2 vs. the “how easy is it to find” questions, we compare length of time using the catalog to ease of finding information. We’d expect that the longer someone has used the Catalog, the easier it is to find information. This comparative data also helps focus our editing efforts.

By looking at questions #1 and #3 we can see how often the Catalog is used by various constituencies, and we can examine the need to send out lots of printed catalogs. This is important as the cost of printing the Catalog becomes a College expense.

Question #5 allows us to compare usage of printed and online catalogs, which again gives us information about where to put our editing efforts.

Questions #6 and 7 both inform about the online Catalog Addendum, and ask about its usage. We use these data to see if we need to push out more information about the addenda. Together with Question #1, we can use the results to target this push.

Finally, Question #8 gives general feedback.

Closing the Loop

After we gather our data, we discuss it amongst staff of the Office of Instruction with an eye towards improvements. Since we conduct this survey regularly, we are gathering data on the impacts of our improvements. We summarize the data and analysis in college-wide assessment and program review reporting.